Our raid team has been struggling on Horridon the past 3 weeks as well.

Week one: Was just crazy, all of us screwed up everything
Week two: We got our Interrupts and Dispels squared away but people were standing in the poop, so we kept dying
Week three: Interrupts, Dispels were awesome, no one died to the poop, but our DPS sunk way low. We went from averaging 85 - 90k to averaging around 65 to 70K. Adds would overwhelm our group, add tank would start losing new adds to the boss tank and we'd die on the 3rd gate.

It's a learning thing, I know. We'll get her eventually, We're a casual group (5 hours of raiding per week) but not lazy. Horridon should have been the 4th or 5th boss. Seems like a huge jump up in difficulty going from Jin'rokh to Horridon. I know the fight was nerfed a few weeks back, but on a big raid like this, when you have lots of mechanics to deal with, it would be nice to have some flexibility as far as DPS is concerned.

Aoeing/cleaving is perfectly fine on most gates, especially if it doesn't have a huge impact on your single target dps (like a surv hunter applying sting with a multishot), and hardly the cause of their problems. At all.

No,not really. Or rather, yes but no. Let me explain....

As an SV hunter I certainly MS the adds and if Barrage is up, use that. BUT... you need to focus fire the elites. So, sure, get SS on the group, but spamming Multishot is bad. That's what I mean by AOEing. The right way to do the adds as a hunter is to get Serpent up on the group, then focus the elites. Refresh SS with a Multishot every once in while but the logs above feel like the hunter's spamming it a bit and that it IS affecting his use of single target spells such as Explosive.

---------- Post added 2013-05-06 at 11:32 AM ----------

Originally Posted by Javster

Our raid team has been struggling on Horridon the past 3 weeks as well.

Week one: Was just crazy, all of us screwed up everything
Week two: We got our Interrupts and Dispels squared away but people were standing in the poop, so we kept dying
Week three: Interrupts, Dispels were awesome, no one died to the poop, but our DPS sunk way low. We went from averaging 85 - 90k to averaging around 65 to 70K. Adds would overwhelm our group, add tank would start losing new adds to the boss tank and we'd die on the 3rd gate.

Make sure you're focusing the elites. Killing them faster will reduce the number of interrupts you need to cast (since the mobs you would be interrupting are dead) and likewise reduce needed dispells. If you need to, burn CDs on the Wastewalkers and then again on the Venom Priests (shorter ones esp, i.e. those that are 2 minutes or less),

Ignore your overall DPS for the most part as long as the elites die at each gate. You can clean up some of the non elites as you kite Horidon from the current gate to the new one. Your overall DPS will skyrocket as you dps Horridon, so comparing your overall DPS to people who are killing him won't make sense - they will have the 200% DPS buff on him at the end and you won't. As an example, here's our kill last night: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/i...?s=1733&e=2383

It looks like we're doubling your DPS... but look at the bump at the end phase after the four gates ar done... that's a huge bump and affects overall DPS. If you isolate just the dps during the gates phase, we're all between 70 and 90k: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/i...?s=1736&e=2176

Our raid team has been struggling on Horridon the past 3 weeks as well.

Week one: Was just crazy, all of us screwed up everything
Week two: We got our Interrupts and Dispels squared away but people were standing in the poop, so we kept dying
Week three: Interrupts, Dispels were awesome, no one died to the poop, but our DPS sunk way low. We went from averaging 85 - 90k to averaging around 65 to 70K. Adds would overwhelm our group, add tank would start losing new adds to the boss tank and we'd die on the 3rd gate.

It's a learning thing, I know. We'll get her eventually, We're a casual group (5 hours of raiding per week) but not lazy. Horridon should have been the 4th or 5th boss. Seems like a huge jump up in difficulty going from Jin'rokh to Horridon. I know the fight was nerfed a few weeks back, but on a big raid like this, when you have lots of mechanics to deal with, it would be nice to have some flexibility as far as DPS is concerned.

There is plenty of flexibility in the fight, its been nerfed twice already. If your DPS dropped by 20k just from having to press some interrupts as DPS that's not really the fight's fault, interrupts aren't on the GCD so in theory they shouldn't lower DPS at all. Hate to break it to you but it doesn't get much easier from here, the big gap in difficulty from Jin to Horridon is not due to Horridon being hard or overtuned, its due to Jin being a joke of a pushover boss. Horridon is pretty in-line with what you should expect from the rest of ToT.

Raven - I agree with you, but I'm guessing the dps drop is temporary as people get used to interrupting their rotation and then picking it back up. A lot of people get into almost a trance on the rotation and breaking it can cause some cognitive and muscle memory 'WTF'. 65-70 on gate DPS is a bit low, but picking that back up by even 10% should, assuming good practice elsewhere, make the fight doable.

Straight up, you guys need to go back to HoF/ToES. Your DPS is atrocious and nowhere near ready for ToT. I'm going to be blunt and say that your group doesn't really want to progress because your gear is all over the place. Not even a single semblance of talent in there, I play a fury warrior, and yours is disgraceful.

By the standards of some heroic guilds if you're in 12/12N you should still change guilds. Its all relative, there's nothing wrong with people being 13/13 or 1/12. So if you have nothing useful or helpful to say then why bother commenting? Its not like you telling them that will magically help them kill Horridon.

By the standards of some heroic guilds if you're in 12/12N you should still change guilds. Its all relative, there's nothing wrong with people being 13/13 or 1/12. So if you have nothing useful or helpful to say then why bother commenting? Its not like you telling them that will magically help them kill Horridon.

It's much less frustrating to raid with guild that gets something done I assure you.

It's much less frustrating to raid with guild that gets something done I assure you.

It's also less frustrating if we don't have to read useless comments. But then, you and Jediwarrior post.

Different raids progress and different rates. Some raid 1-2 nights a week and aren't hardcore. 4/12 is fine for them. Some have newer raiders or people who don't theorycraft a lot but are decent. What you guys would do is irrelevant as are comments that don't help them with the issue at hand.

but on a big raid like this, when you have lots of mechanics to deal with, it would be nice to have some flexibility as far as DPS is concerned.

I think part of the problem is that you're approaching this fight with the idea that there are a lot of mechanics to deal with when, really, there aren't.

Every door has a "don't stand in this spot" mechanic and most of them are quite visible. These are all, essentially, the same mechanic and can be treated as such.

The first door has a magic dispel, second has a poison dispel, third has a disease dispel (fourth has a curse? I never paid attention at that point). All of these are, again, pretty much the same mechanic, just with different classes being able to handle them. The poison dispel can be nullified through proper interrupts. In fact, I believe you can simply mark the mobs before you even pull the boss and assign interrupts to those marks. If you assign interrupts to all three of them, you should be fine on the second door. Also, interrupts, aside from Avenger's Shield, are not disruptive to rotations. Interrupts are off the GCD and should never lower a person's DPS unless, again, they are a prot pally using Avenger's Shield.

So, at this point, you've basically got different versions of two mechanics. Treat them as such!

You mentioned that Horridon shouldn't have been the second boss in the instance. This might be a bit of a surprise, but most of the rest of the bosses are harder than Horridon. If you're still having problems with Horridon after taking in some of the advice from this thread, I'm going to suggest that you need to start replacing people, because it's not going to get any easier and it sounds to me like your problem is player error. Sure, it's a learning issue, but all of what they need to learn is essentially raiding 101: Don't stand in stuff, dispel, interrupt. That's it. If your players haven't learned that from the previous tier, then they're probably not going to learn it in this tier.

Figure out who is failing you and replace them. If you can't/won't do that, then accept that you've peaked and probably won't be seeing other bosses.

It would be difficult for me to even explain how much easier you will find this boss if you stop letting people come who are no where near ready to raid. Something you could consider is having all your raiders get coins, then doing HoF, ToES and even MGV on normal. Coin every boss. You will get an absurd amount of gear. Alternatively, just have them run every single LFR a few times. Your time would be better spent doing that then banging your head against Horridon. You will kill him, eventually, but you won't kill Sul before he does sandstorm with that damage. You won't kill Tortos before your healers and tanks die when the soft enrage starts. You're just going to face the same problems over and over again, and even if you do eventually manage to get them down, you'll have as much trouble with these bosses on normal as most guilds did on heroic.

I think part of the problem is that you're approaching this fight with the idea that there are a lot of mechanics to deal with when, really, there aren't.

Every door has a "don't stand in this spot" mechanic and most of them are quite visible. These are all, essentially, the same mechanic and can be treated as such.

The first door has a magic dispel, second has a poison dispel, third has a disease dispel (fourth has a curse? I never paid attention at that point). All of these are, again, pretty much the same mechanic, just with different classes being able to handle them. The poison dispel can be nullified through proper interrupts. In fact, I believe you can simply mark the mobs before you even pull the boss and assign interrupts to those marks. If you assign interrupts to all three of them, you should be fine on the second door. Also, interrupts, aside from Avenger's Shield, are not disruptive to rotations. Interrupts are off the GCD and should never lower a person's DPS unless, again, they are a prot pally using Avenger's Shield.

So, at this point, you've basically got different versions of two mechanics. Treat them as such!

This is an excellent point - The doors are all basically the same mechanics-wise. Target elites, focus them down while getting some AOE on the non-eiltes. Interrupt elite casts. If one gets off, dispell. Don't stand in bad. Move to next door.

Gearwise, you really do want to be 500+ - it makes this fight a lot easier because if you're there and your dps can execute you can burn the elites down in time if you focus them. What you can't do is a) just AOE the adds all the time b) have focus split so that some are on one mob, some are on others. You can do this with less than 500 gear, but you have less room for error.

WAIT: Your mages are 485 and 496... I don't have time to vet everyeone, but now I see what others are on about... go get gear. If you have VP get SPA gear. Run T14 and gear. Run ToT LFR and gear. I think your issue might simply be that you're undergeared. A 485 mage doing 60k dps isn't too bad... there might be some execution issues, but take that samemage, add 20 ilevels and I'd be stunned if they don't do 90k DPS with the exact same execution.

Yeah we have dicussed it in the guild, and people need to do more LFR. The 496 Mage has ''Decent'' gear for ToT, but is lacking DPS and refuses to respecc out of Fire, which i heard is crap atm. As i have told in my guild, im sick of carrieng people. But to stop on the DPS for a bit, how are the healers performing?

Yeah we have dicussed it in the guild, and people need to do more LFR. The 496 Mage has ''Decent'' gear for ToT, but is lacking DPS and refuses to respecc out of Fire, which i heard is crap atm. As i have told in my guild, im sick of carrieng people. But to stop on the DPS for a bit, how are the healers performing?

Fire is only crap if you're undergeared (which he is). Then again, it's the most mobile mage spec and almost every fight this tier includes heavy movement, so that might make them fairly even. All that said, doing ToT with a casual group under 500 ilvl is not a great idea. The fact that they're under 500 ilvl means they haven't been doing LFR every week either, which shows a lack of commitment to progression (as does their inability to play their class above 60% of its potential).

Your healers are playing pretty badly too. 30-40k hps was low for week 1 normal MSV. It's amazing low for ToT. And it's not due to lack of damage taken; people are dying to unavoidable damage mechanics.

Yeah we have dicussed it in the guild, and people need to do more LFR. The 496 Mage has ''Decent'' gear for ToT, but is lacking DPS and refuses to respecc out of Fire, which i heard is crap atm. As i have told in my guild, im sick of carrieng people. But to stop on the DPS for a bit, how are the healers performing?

You're 3 healing Horridon which is normally a 2 heal fight and even with only 2 there's not that much damage, its more about dispels and burst heals in a few moments. I mean they might do low HPS right now but you can't heal if there's no damage and Horridon executed properly has very low damage. So its hard to just look at an overall HPS number and say "too low" or "good enough".

I would say go down to 2 healers and try that out. By all rights the fight should be doable with 2, we've done it that way since week 1 of ToT and when we started our gear wasn't any better than your current healers' gear.

More logs might help but I don't know enough about those classes to go in-depth off of just 3 heal Horridon wipes and their armories.

It can also help to run Heart of Fear/Terrace Springs to get better gear (IE 4 set bonuses etc) to help in the beginning of Throne of Thunder. You can zip through both in a few hours and of course, use all of your elder charms for a chance at more tokens and all that good stuff. That is what my guild did and it really did work wonders. We're only on the 5th boss currently, but we only raid 5-6 hours a week and at times one day a week/none. I look at it as, if my guild can do it, you can also! lol.

I can tell you our guild after 130 wipes on normal finally got horridon down last Saturday. He is the bump in the road for progression that is for sure for more of the casual guilds out there. to me it looks like you need a lot more DPS and stop taking unnecessary damage from posions and such. INTERUPTS>DISPELLS are key in this fight. If you dont have that well then, you're screwed.

My raid team lusted on third due to only having one dispeller for door 3. But, you need to get more geared that is for sure. I know i started out on Horridon at around 70k and got geared over 2 months and now do 110k on the dorrs so. Just try to get more geared. If not you'll be there for a while.

Fire is only crap if you're undergeared (which he is). Then again, it's the most mobile mage spec and almost every fight this tier includes heavy movement, so that might make them fairly even.

Based on my own experience as mage from the 12 normal mode bosses, I'm doing fine as frost on basically all fights except Durumu and Lei Shen last phase with all the wind. I also find frost pretty simple to play since - if you ignore some of the finer details - it's just a plain and simple whack-a-proc spec. You really can't go very wrong with it, whereas fire has much more potential to do really low dps if you screw it a little while watching mechanics more than your dps.